Google recently enabled a new security feature in Chrome to secure the users from malicious attacks like Spectre. Called Site Isolation, the new feature is available with Chrome 67 on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS.
The search engine giant had been experimenting the Site Isolation feature since Chrome 63, and have patched a lot of issues before enabling it by default for all desktop Chrome users.
The multi-process architecture of Chrome allows different tabs to use different renderer processes. What Site Isolation does is limiting each renderer process to documents from a single site. It makes Chrome rely on operating system, resulting in mitigating attack between processes, and sites.
“In Chrome 67, Site Isolation has been enabled for 99% of users on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS,” explained Google in a blog post.
“Even if a Spectre attack were to occur in a malicious web page, data from other websites would generally not be loaded into the same process, and so there would be much less data available to the attacker. This significantly reduces the threat posed by Spectre.”
Google said that there are additional known issues in Chrome for Android, and the company is working on it. The Site Isolation for Chrome for Android is expected to be experimentally available with Chrome 68.
Another new feature Google rolled out to all users is Speed Update for Google Search on mobile. This feature will make the speed of pages a ranking factor for mobile searches.
The page speed has been in work for search engine ranking for some time now, but it was only available with desktop searches.
According to studies, people want to find answer to their searches as fast as possible, and really care about the speed of page. Keeping that in mind, Google’s new feature for mobile users will only affect the pages that deliver very slow experience. The other pages will remain unaffected.
Also read: Google’s low-code app development tool App Maker now generally available
